I don't know whether the undecorated state of your new residence was intentional - the painting of the walls rather low down on a list of priorities. Whatever the reason, it seems prudent. This is your domain, where following over a year of abstract living in various hospitals, rehab facilities and care homes, rubber finally bites down on tarmac and you have to carve out a life for yourself. Part of that will entail asserting control over what you can reasonably expect to control, accepting what you can't, and, over time, working out small ways to extend your reach. Somewhere in that messy dichotomy lies the formula for human dignity. At a fundamental level, the control part of the equation must encompass how your home is decorated. Nobody wants to suddenly be thrust in-between lavender-toned walls with homey upbeat platitudes burnt into the exposed woodwork. You get the blank canvas that displays the scars of a previous occupancy and you get to say what goes on it.
This raises a psychological conundrum. In decorating, do you wilfully estrange yourself from your past in order to move forward? Is that healthy? Climbing was a massive part of your life - a raison d'être. You can't do it any more but that doesn't mean that you can draw a hard line under it either. For one thing, those experiences are a part of you. They shaped your character. While you have lost physical mobility, the mental fortitude and the resourcefulness that you developed during those climbs remains in a state of continuance and can be brought to bear when addressing aspects of your future. We are four-dimensional entities moving in one direction. Our past informs our future.
My foray into psychology ended with my formal education, at the A-level stage, so I am certainly over-reaching. However, it occurs to me that a significant mental breakthrough will come when you are able to contemplate a rock that you once scaled, or even a photograph of yourself mid-climb, and regard it as an accomplishment – a moment to be recalled fondly rather than a source of anguish that must be erased because it causes you too much pain. If turn your head away from it, you are also turning your head away from valuable parts of yourself. You are narrowing your horizons.
What is the alternative? A framed watercolour print of some daffodils? A wall mural of the 17th Century Rationalists, painted by John Cottingham – the Banksy of Cartesian punditry – written-off for tax purposes as a rehab aid? I once fell asleep at the foot of a television set and awoke to a Saturday morning football show with the face of Alan Hanson looming over me. It's no way to live.
When I was 13 years old, our family moved to a larger house a couple of miles away. This relocation occurred while I was on five-day a school trip to Bradwell. All I can really remember of the experience is the gigantic pair of soiled Y-fronts that one of my dorm-mates found festering in his rented sleeping bag, and the large crab that was interviewed on video camera regarding its thoughts on the planned construction of a new dock. I returned to a completely different home, to an L-shaped bedroom, smaller than the one I previously occupied and decorated with cartoony air plane wallpaper. All my stuff was there but it was arranged differently. It was awful. Because I hadn't been a part of the move and had no say in where my belongings went, I felt alienated from my own possessions.
The room that I occupy now is a summation of my interests, my past and my present. The cacti and the carnivorous plants; the box-framed insects and abundant ceiling origami. The numbered boxes of CDs that crowd the shelving units. There are pictures on the wall that once evoked pain and melancholy. I think that I maybe put them up as a means of coming to terms with loss. There is a photograph of Cat Moore who died at the age of 35 from the same illness that is killing me. Alongside the wardrobe (now full of CDs) there is a framed biro sketch of me and some Romanian / Israeli fishermen that was drawn by an Eritrean whore. I used to travel a lot. Now I can't; I'm too sick, but even before then I'd lost my nerve I don't even own a passport. It troubled me for a while.
My great uncle, in his bed-bound, post-centennial dotage was able to look fondly upon a framed photograph of the ship he served on during World War II, in spite of the horrors that he witnessed. I hope that, in time, you will be able to broker a similar peace with images of your past. I don't think you should kick dirt over them.
Sam, I know I’ve replied before but I just can’t read your comments (so clever, kind, knowledgeable and pragmatic) without always wanting to reply. Why? I don’t know exactly - to say that somebody thinks you sound pretty amazing and that the fact you can reach out from your own suffering to try to help others with theirs is bloody beautiful. I don’t know you but I think of you quite often and wish you well.
As someone who found my only child hanged, it's clear you are in grief. My trauma is hidden from the outside world because I look and move the same as I did before my son's suicide. Your trauma is visible, but your grief is hidden. It's exceptionally hard living after a major trauma permanently destroys your life. I instinctively knew I must face the trauma I experienced by going into the bedroom where my son died and sorting through his belongings. I still can't believe I managed to take the vast majority of his belongings to the thrift store in large garbage bags just a week after he died. Like you, I realized trying to maintain or recreated a life that was suddenly gone would be more painful.
I still live in the house where he died. We had recently moved in and my now husband endured horrific cancer treatment a year prior and was still recovering. Moving would have been too hard, so we stayed. Each day I see my son's school, the skate park he loved, his favorite hangouts, and the hospital where he died.
While my trauma is very different from yours, I believe our grief is similar. I'm not going to get you a load of crap that this is for the best and someday you will look at your accident as a gift. I actually had a well-meaning friend give me a book about a woman who said her son's suicide was a gift! Nope, your accident and my son's suicide aren't challenges: they are horrific traumas that caused irreparable damage. I lost my job because of my panic attacks, which affected my family financially. Basically, my entire life was shattered leaving me to pick up the pieces.
I can share the panic attacks and triggers are milder than they were six years ago. There are moments of beauty and joy that push through the pain. I hope the same will happen for you. That someday when you see a reminder from your past life it will only make you sad for a short period, that you will be sad instead of consumed by the deepest depression. I have good days, and I also have bad days. I guess the years have helped me accept the irreversible loss and find a way to go on. Lockdowns triggered my PTSD, and I very much regret yelling at my family. Now, I understand such loss and trauma gives me insight into how hard life can be on some people. My focus isn't on making my life better because I can't do that. I just try each day to do the best I can and be kind to others because like me, they're probably hurting too.
I wish you peace -- and new paint and beautiful artwork to transform your blank, dirty walls into something beautiful.
This read like a lost chapter to Dante’s Inferno. I feel so very sad for you, but also so full of admiration that you still brave the mountain and tell this gut-wrenchingly awful tale. I would volunteer to paint your walls. X
I’m so sorry that your flat is not really a home for you. If I lived closer (I’m in the U.S.), I would volunteer to paint your walls. Even without artwork, a non-institutional color palate can influence your mood.
There may be a point where your old artwork is less painful, and you can revisit good memories. Like images of a deceased loved one-- perhaps too painful to view in the moment, but later evoking a different (or more muted) reaction.
Perhaps now is the time to think about what, in your new life, you want to experience visually. Might a different life (no value placed on whether it is worse) require different visuals to stimulate, or calm, or whatever you feel you need your home to provide?
You talk about clothes and walls. I get that. But, you still have your books. I’m guessing those are as important as they ever were. And, luckily, you didn’t suffer cognitive (or visual) impairment. So, you’ve still got part of your old life and your old identity. That wouldn’t be important to a lot of people. But, you are different-- you’re so good academic work and still have much to share.
Dear Paul, I am SO sorry that you are having to go through this. My father was confined to bed for the last four years of his life, and managing his care was so difficult until we found an absolutely amazing woman who quite simply saved us all with her love and capability. But he was 88 when it happened, and not a young man like yourself. I earnestly hope that you will feel better, that you will be able to return to your academic work and have some kind of independence.
I’m so so sorry. Also, I think you are right. I think I’d say it was a grieving process. You have to go into it to get out of it. It seems cheap to offer you hope of that and mean not to. I think I agree that what you need next is new pictures, photos, art works. Start looking.
Sending you love. And I pray that from the ashes of your old life, new things will form that might, one day, also offer engagement, excitement and interest. I know they will be radically different to the old things that made you feel that way, but you are different too. And you have a remarkable mind to exercise - you are a talented writer and an amazing communicator. You have so many qualities of strength, honesty, humour, expressiveness, compassion, fight and your independence (perhaps ironically right now) shines through everything. Even as you cannot cope you still cope better than I ever could. Maybe what has happened will strengthen parts of you that you hadn’t really so much before (like your writing?). I just mean please don’t give up hope of change or of things improving or even that one day you might accept the new way (maybe that’s the scariest thought of all). I know that life has changed in the cruellest way of all for someone like you. Loss of mobility must be torture for a physical person. You might not be able to climb now but you are still the man who climbed all
Those mountains - how many of us can say we climbed even one? Now you are climbing a spiritual mountain but you still have all your skills. You can reach the top of this one too, and turn to look at how far you’ve come and maybe even see that things look bearable on the other side.
The will to live is so strong, and I hear hope, Paul. Bless you for the insight, intelligence and authenticity to continue to write this blog which gives people like me so much faith in dark times-
Everyone here left such articulate, kind and wise words. All I can say is, making a place your own helps your headspace immensely. I realize I'm just a random person, but if you want someone to paint your walls, I'd happily do so. I'm just a mom with teenage kids who will be kid-free this summer as they return to the US to visit family. I'm in NW England and have the summer off. Seriously, I'm not a professional but I've painted many, many rooms and I'm happy to lend a hand.
Nearly time I've moved house (or room, when at university) the first night has been awful and the ensuing days nearly as bad - you are convinced that it's all a terrible mistake. For me the feeling would start to clear after about three weeks or so. Your situation is vastly more difficult - I'm not trying to equate it with a "normal" housemove at all, but perhaps just to use that comparison to say that it's probably not surprising that it feels so very very rough right now. There must be something very deep and animal in the human psyche that gets disturbed by changing our home, and that is happening on top of all the other, terrible losses that you have experienced. I hope that, however deep a nadir this one is, it does still prove to be temporary and that you find things start to improve again in time.
I don't know whether the undecorated state of your new residence was intentional - the painting of the walls rather low down on a list of priorities. Whatever the reason, it seems prudent. This is your domain, where following over a year of abstract living in various hospitals, rehab facilities and care homes, rubber finally bites down on tarmac and you have to carve out a life for yourself. Part of that will entail asserting control over what you can reasonably expect to control, accepting what you can't, and, over time, working out small ways to extend your reach. Somewhere in that messy dichotomy lies the formula for human dignity. At a fundamental level, the control part of the equation must encompass how your home is decorated. Nobody wants to suddenly be thrust in-between lavender-toned walls with homey upbeat platitudes burnt into the exposed woodwork. You get the blank canvas that displays the scars of a previous occupancy and you get to say what goes on it.
This raises a psychological conundrum. In decorating, do you wilfully estrange yourself from your past in order to move forward? Is that healthy? Climbing was a massive part of your life - a raison d'être. You can't do it any more but that doesn't mean that you can draw a hard line under it either. For one thing, those experiences are a part of you. They shaped your character. While you have lost physical mobility, the mental fortitude and the resourcefulness that you developed during those climbs remains in a state of continuance and can be brought to bear when addressing aspects of your future. We are four-dimensional entities moving in one direction. Our past informs our future.
My foray into psychology ended with my formal education, at the A-level stage, so I am certainly over-reaching. However, it occurs to me that a significant mental breakthrough will come when you are able to contemplate a rock that you once scaled, or even a photograph of yourself mid-climb, and regard it as an accomplishment – a moment to be recalled fondly rather than a source of anguish that must be erased because it causes you too much pain. If turn your head away from it, you are also turning your head away from valuable parts of yourself. You are narrowing your horizons.
What is the alternative? A framed watercolour print of some daffodils? A wall mural of the 17th Century Rationalists, painted by John Cottingham – the Banksy of Cartesian punditry – written-off for tax purposes as a rehab aid? I once fell asleep at the foot of a television set and awoke to a Saturday morning football show with the face of Alan Hanson looming over me. It's no way to live.
When I was 13 years old, our family moved to a larger house a couple of miles away. This relocation occurred while I was on five-day a school trip to Bradwell. All I can really remember of the experience is the gigantic pair of soiled Y-fronts that one of my dorm-mates found festering in his rented sleeping bag, and the large crab that was interviewed on video camera regarding its thoughts on the planned construction of a new dock. I returned to a completely different home, to an L-shaped bedroom, smaller than the one I previously occupied and decorated with cartoony air plane wallpaper. All my stuff was there but it was arranged differently. It was awful. Because I hadn't been a part of the move and had no say in where my belongings went, I felt alienated from my own possessions.
The room that I occupy now is a summation of my interests, my past and my present. The cacti and the carnivorous plants; the box-framed insects and abundant ceiling origami. The numbered boxes of CDs that crowd the shelving units. There are pictures on the wall that once evoked pain and melancholy. I think that I maybe put them up as a means of coming to terms with loss. There is a photograph of Cat Moore who died at the age of 35 from the same illness that is killing me. Alongside the wardrobe (now full of CDs) there is a framed biro sketch of me and some Romanian / Israeli fishermen that was drawn by an Eritrean whore. I used to travel a lot. Now I can't; I'm too sick, but even before then I'd lost my nerve I don't even own a passport. It troubled me for a while.
My great uncle, in his bed-bound, post-centennial dotage was able to look fondly upon a framed photograph of the ship he served on during World War II, in spite of the horrors that he witnessed. I hope that, in time, you will be able to broker a similar peace with images of your past. I don't think you should kick dirt over them.
Sam, I know I’ve replied before but I just can’t read your comments (so clever, kind, knowledgeable and pragmatic) without always wanting to reply. Why? I don’t know exactly - to say that somebody thinks you sound pretty amazing and that the fact you can reach out from your own suffering to try to help others with theirs is bloody beautiful. I don’t know you but I think of you quite often and wish you well.
As someone who found my only child hanged, it's clear you are in grief. My trauma is hidden from the outside world because I look and move the same as I did before my son's suicide. Your trauma is visible, but your grief is hidden. It's exceptionally hard living after a major trauma permanently destroys your life. I instinctively knew I must face the trauma I experienced by going into the bedroom where my son died and sorting through his belongings. I still can't believe I managed to take the vast majority of his belongings to the thrift store in large garbage bags just a week after he died. Like you, I realized trying to maintain or recreated a life that was suddenly gone would be more painful.
I still live in the house where he died. We had recently moved in and my now husband endured horrific cancer treatment a year prior and was still recovering. Moving would have been too hard, so we stayed. Each day I see my son's school, the skate park he loved, his favorite hangouts, and the hospital where he died.
While my trauma is very different from yours, I believe our grief is similar. I'm not going to get you a load of crap that this is for the best and someday you will look at your accident as a gift. I actually had a well-meaning friend give me a book about a woman who said her son's suicide was a gift! Nope, your accident and my son's suicide aren't challenges: they are horrific traumas that caused irreparable damage. I lost my job because of my panic attacks, which affected my family financially. Basically, my entire life was shattered leaving me to pick up the pieces.
I can share the panic attacks and triggers are milder than they were six years ago. There are moments of beauty and joy that push through the pain. I hope the same will happen for you. That someday when you see a reminder from your past life it will only make you sad for a short period, that you will be sad instead of consumed by the deepest depression. I have good days, and I also have bad days. I guess the years have helped me accept the irreversible loss and find a way to go on. Lockdowns triggered my PTSD, and I very much regret yelling at my family. Now, I understand such loss and trauma gives me insight into how hard life can be on some people. My focus isn't on making my life better because I can't do that. I just try each day to do the best I can and be kind to others because like me, they're probably hurting too.
I wish you peace -- and new paint and beautiful artwork to transform your blank, dirty walls into something beautiful.
This read like a lost chapter to Dante’s Inferno. I feel so very sad for you, but also so full of admiration that you still brave the mountain and tell this gut-wrenchingly awful tale. I would volunteer to paint your walls. X
The words 'agony' and 'torture' come to mind Paul. Time to put up a bookcase. 💚
I’m so sorry that your flat is not really a home for you. If I lived closer (I’m in the U.S.), I would volunteer to paint your walls. Even without artwork, a non-institutional color palate can influence your mood.
There may be a point where your old artwork is less painful, and you can revisit good memories. Like images of a deceased loved one-- perhaps too painful to view in the moment, but later evoking a different (or more muted) reaction.
Perhaps now is the time to think about what, in your new life, you want to experience visually. Might a different life (no value placed on whether it is worse) require different visuals to stimulate, or calm, or whatever you feel you need your home to provide?
You talk about clothes and walls. I get that. But, you still have your books. I’m guessing those are as important as they ever were. And, luckily, you didn’t suffer cognitive (or visual) impairment. So, you’ve still got part of your old life and your old identity. That wouldn’t be important to a lot of people. But, you are different-- you’re so good academic work and still have much to share.
Dear Paul, I am SO sorry that you are having to go through this. My father was confined to bed for the last four years of his life, and managing his care was so difficult until we found an absolutely amazing woman who quite simply saved us all with her love and capability. But he was 88 when it happened, and not a young man like yourself. I earnestly hope that you will feel better, that you will be able to return to your academic work and have some kind of independence.
I’m so so sorry. Also, I think you are right. I think I’d say it was a grieving process. You have to go into it to get out of it. It seems cheap to offer you hope of that and mean not to. I think I agree that what you need next is new pictures, photos, art works. Start looking.
Sending you love. And I pray that from the ashes of your old life, new things will form that might, one day, also offer engagement, excitement and interest. I know they will be radically different to the old things that made you feel that way, but you are different too. And you have a remarkable mind to exercise - you are a talented writer and an amazing communicator. You have so many qualities of strength, honesty, humour, expressiveness, compassion, fight and your independence (perhaps ironically right now) shines through everything. Even as you cannot cope you still cope better than I ever could. Maybe what has happened will strengthen parts of you that you hadn’t really so much before (like your writing?). I just mean please don’t give up hope of change or of things improving or even that one day you might accept the new way (maybe that’s the scariest thought of all). I know that life has changed in the cruellest way of all for someone like you. Loss of mobility must be torture for a physical person. You might not be able to climb now but you are still the man who climbed all
Those mountains - how many of us can say we climbed even one? Now you are climbing a spiritual mountain but you still have all your skills. You can reach the top of this one too, and turn to look at how far you’ve come and maybe even see that things look bearable on the other side.
The will to live is so strong, and I hear hope, Paul. Bless you for the insight, intelligence and authenticity to continue to write this blog which gives people like me so much faith in dark times-
Everyone here left such articulate, kind and wise words. All I can say is, making a place your own helps your headspace immensely. I realize I'm just a random person, but if you want someone to paint your walls, I'd happily do so. I'm just a mom with teenage kids who will be kid-free this summer as they return to the US to visit family. I'm in NW England and have the summer off. Seriously, I'm not a professional but I've painted many, many rooms and I'm happy to lend a hand.
Nearly time I've moved house (or room, when at university) the first night has been awful and the ensuing days nearly as bad - you are convinced that it's all a terrible mistake. For me the feeling would start to clear after about three weeks or so. Your situation is vastly more difficult - I'm not trying to equate it with a "normal" housemove at all, but perhaps just to use that comparison to say that it's probably not surprising that it feels so very very rough right now. There must be something very deep and animal in the human psyche that gets disturbed by changing our home, and that is happening on top of all the other, terrible losses that you have experienced. I hope that, however deep a nadir this one is, it does still prove to be temporary and that you find things start to improve again in time.
Brilliant piece. "The fantasy was revealed as what it always was, and hope died with it.
But it had to be done. The fantasy had to die." So true, so painful, so real.
I hope you can start shaping the flat by, for example, choosing colours of the walls before getting on to issues like paintings and pictures.